cannot meet.”
The Carters then climbed on a tandem bike, a Christmas gift from their hometown, and pedaled off down Main Street, looking positively carefree for the first time in more than a year.
At the end of November, the student captors began relocating the hostages to the Tehran mansion of onetime SAVAK chief Teymour Bahktiari, who had been assassinated by Iranian agents in Iraq after a falling-out with the shah in 1970. His extravagant home had been converted by the shah into a sumptuous guesthouse, and though it had fallen into disuse and some disrepair after the revolution it was, to the hostages, sheer luxury. There were working bathrooms with tubs and showers and hot and cold running water. Many of the rooms looked out over spacious gardens, which, while bare and sometimes snow-covered as winter closed over the city, and while the windows had been fitted with wire mesh or bars, it afforded for many of them the first steady view of the outdoors in over a year.
As usual, they didn’t know why they were being moved, but there was a growing sense even among the hostages that the long drama was nearing its end. They had very limited access to news, but there were subtle signs of a breakthrough everywhere, and the hostages missed none of them. In early December, still at Evin, Colonel Chuck Scott and his roommates had not seen the kindly guard supervisor Akbar for several weeks when one day he showed up with a bag of fresh pistachios. He announced that he was no longer involved with supervising hostages, that he had taken a job with PARS, the Iranian news agency. The whole situation, the standoff, the shah’s death, the war, had grown so complex and difficult that he said he no longer wished to be involved.
Scott was angry with him. The two had developed a friendship over the yearlong ordeal, and he was the one Iranian whom the colonel felt he could trust and even respect. Ever since the previous summer, Scott had seen Akbar’s enthusiasm for the exercise waning. The young Iranian still defended the action but acknowledged that nothing had worked out the way he and the others had planned. Scott had told him once during the previous summer in Tabriz that if he helped him and his roommates escape, he would see to it that Akbar would be paid for his efforts and set up in America or wherever he wanted with a new identity. He had been surprised by the guard’s response. He did not get angry nor did he dismiss the idea out of hand. “Be careful of what you say,” he had advised the colonel. It had always been reassuring to know that Akbar was there; many times he had interceded to pull Scott out of solitary or to calm tensions with guards and fellow hostages.
“Now you tell me that you’re tired of it?” Scott said.
His disgust wounded Akbar, who acknowledged a trace of betrayal in his departure. But after a few moments of conversation Scott’s anger melted. No one could understand better than he the desire to escape this dismal ordeal, and the fact that Akbar had stayed with it for so long despite his ambivalence started Scott thinking that there might be more behind his young friend’s departure than he was free to tell.
“Do you still think I will ever get home?” he asked.
“In my heart, I am sure you will live to see your family again,” Akbar said. “When you are released, if it is possible, I will come to say good-bye.”
Still alone, CIA station chief Tom Ahern delayed taking off his blindfold when he was first brought to the guesthouse. He had been placed in a very cold room in an overstuffed chair. He had a powerful sense that what he saw would finally reveal his fate. Was release near or death? He was certain that if the surroundings were worse than those he had left then he would never get out of Iran alive.
The upholstered chair was a good sign. He began reaching around and felt some kind of soft wallpaper, something fancy with padding behind it. He finally inhaled deeply, untied the blindfold, and discovered that he was sitting in an elegantly furnished room, and for the first time in fourteen months he was filled with the conviction that this ordeal was going to end well. He felt it in his bones. He was going home.
As part of the general improvement, his guards were now encouraging him to write letters. He thought it unlikely that any letter he wrote would actually be mailed, but he was certain that his captors would read it, so primarily for their eyes he wrote a long letter to his wife. It was a contingent good-bye letter. He wrote that Reagan’s election made it certain the United States would attack Iran and destroy the revolution. “If Reagan comes and gets them,” he wrote, “I won’t survive it. So let me say good-bye and I love you just in case.”
He hoped that would make them think.
Laingen, Tomseth, and Howland were finally moved from their spacious quarters at the Foreign Ministry, but not without a scuffle. When a group of students first showed up to take them, Howland got in a shoving match with the leader, kicking him in the groin, and the three had been escorted back upstairs at gunpoint. They were left alone in their rooms and, after a few minutes, a deputy foreign minister appeared looking shaken.
“This is not Iran,” he said, as if trying to convince himself. “This is not Iran. What has happened to us?”
“This is the first time in my diplomatic career that I have had a pistol pointed at my head,” said Laingen.
The three were successfully removed some days later and locked in prison for several weeks before being moved to the guesthouse.
Kathryn Koob and Ann Swift could scarcely believe their eyes when they arrived. They had been brought to what appeared to be a large, luxurious hotel room suite with a fifteen-foot ceiling. It was clean, with a closet, beds, a bathroom with hot and cold water, and a tub! At the center of the room was a large, gleaming mahogany table with two straight-back chairs, and hanging from the high ceiling was a pewter chandelier. The walls were papered with a textured material, and one whole wall was a floor-to-ceiling window covered with pale blue drapes. Koob and Swift were astonished. The suite was so large they could now actually run from room to room instead of running in place, as they had for most of the year. They jogged for almost an hour late that night, waiting for their bedding and possessions to arrive. Both were fit and had lost a lot of weight. Koob especially. She had dropped so many pounds that she had made Christmas presents out of the wide strips of material she had cut from the seams of her blue slacks. She used them to make bookmarks, on which she embroidered small designs. Reed thin for the first time since she had been a little girl, Koob was now virtually unrecognizable to those who had known her only as big, soft, and wide-hipped. She was now all sharp angles, the hard lines of her face ill suited to her wide-framed plastic glasses.
She and Swift counted this as their thirteenth move since the day they were taken prisoner. Koob took out her Christmas ornaments, some of them saved from the previous year, and set about decorating the enormous space. When the sun came up they were allowed to pull back the blue drapes and their rooms were flooded with sunlight. What a pleasure! They looked out over a snow-covered garden with a backdrop of mountains, a thrilling view after their months of close confinement. Koob marveled at the simple things, the feel of sunlight on her skin as she sat near the window, the way the tinsel and foil in her Christmas decorations twinkled. Yet the new home was harrowing in the evenings, as Iraqi air assaults on the capital continued. When the planes came over they moved to the entryway of the suite, as far away from the broad window as they could get.
The guards asked them to prepare their room for a holiday party. They received an artificial tree and strips of bright red and white ribbons and—of all things—yellow bows. The women wondered if their guards knew the significance of yellow ribbons back home and decided to put one big one front and center, where the cameras would not miss it. When it came time for the party, to their disappointment, they were led out. Women were forbidden to worship with the men, the guards explained. So they sat forlorn in a chilly room down the hall and listened to chorus after chorus of “Silent Night” as the male hostages were led into their suite in groups.
For the hostages’ second Christmas in captivity, the students and the Iranian government decided against allowing a visit from American clergy. Instead they arranged for ceremonies at the Foreign Ministry guesthouse to be conducted by priests and ministers from Tehran’s small Christian community.
Film of the celebrations, which resembled the one made a year earlier, was shown throughout the world.
Joe Hall stuffed his pockets with candy and pastries and asked if he could say something to the cameras for his wife Cheri.
“I’m still out here, honey, and I can hold on if you can, kid.”
Greg Persinger told the camera, “Mom, Dad, I just want to say Merry Christmas and I send you my love…. Take care. I hope I see you soon.”
